traces in France. The first tells of a maiden who feigned to be dead, and so was carried over the border to be buried, and there met her lover 66 As soon as Lord William touched her hand, May Colvine," again, is the story of a lady whose bridegroom tried to drown her on their way to his house, but who got the better of him by a ruse, and drowned him. Now we find the plot of the first of these ballads in the French song of "La Maîtresse Captive." But, curiously enough, the French reciters have added the tragedy of "May Colvine" to the comedy of "The Goss Hawk," have made the lover, for whom the lady pretended to be dead, turn out a sort of Bluebeard, and have drowned him where he meant to drown his bride. Quand ils ont venu au bord de l'eau, "La belle, défaites votre manteau, Votre chemise de vrai lin, Qui paraît comme un satin." "Ce n'est pas affaire aux chevaliers, De prendre un mouchoir, les yeux se bandeler." For the result of this manœuvre "May Colvine" may be consulted. That is But as Sir John he turned him round, She threw him in the sea; Says, "Lye ye there, ye fausse Sir John, La belle le prit par le côté, Whence came this story, which is current in Venice, Portugal, Brittany, Denmark, and Bohemia? Historical it can scarcely be, and, indeed, few French ballads have their source in history. There is some memory of the French marriage of our Henry V.— Le roi a une fille à marier, A un Anglois la veut donner, S'il n'est François. However, she goes on board ship with the faux traître Anglois, and, like Marie Stuart, takes a long last look on France: Ote-toi, retire-toi, faux traître Anglois, Car je veux voir jusqu'à la fin le sol François. This ballad has a double ending. In one, la belle finissoit ses jours d'un cœur joyeux at midnight, in the other she made up her mind not to mind it, and expressed her intention of proving a true wife to the traître Anglois.* Ballads of superstition are scarce, but there is a good one in the Provençal collection. Three orphans are beaten and starved by their stepmother, they go to their mother's tomb, and on the way they meet Lou Bouen Diou (Jesus). He bids the mother arise, and promises her seven years of life. When the seven years are over, the children tell the woman not to weep, for they will accompany her, and her people shall be their people. So a sad little procession, wherein the youngest sings a hymn, and the others bear mystic flowers and branches of hyssop and torches, returns to the graveyard. This song is found in Denmark, where the children remain on earth, and their stepmother dares never beat them when dogs howl at night. She fears that the dogs howl because graves are opening, and the dead are walking abroad to protect their own. One is reminded of the Yorkshire verse 'Twas late in the night, and the bairns grat, Another superstition, that of the metamorphosis of girls into animals, is found in Normandy A mother and her daughter are walking in a wood; the mother sings, the maiden is silent. 66 Why dost thou weep, my daughter Marguerite?" "I have a sore lot laid on me, that I dare not tell thee. I am a maiden by daylight, a white doe in the moonlight. The chase is up, and after me, the barons and the princes. "And my brother Lion is far the keenest; go then, my mother, and tell him quickly, that he hold his hounds in leash till to-morrow is come." "Good day, good day to thee, my son!" * Good day to thee, my mother." "Where are thy hounds, Lion? Tell me, I prithee." "They are in the wild wood, a' chasing the white doe." "Stay them, Lion, call them off, I pray thee." "Nay, thrice I have laid them on; the fourth time is come, and the white doe is taken." "Let us send the forester to gralloch the white doe." Then said the forester, "What to say I wot not. This doe hath gold hair, and the breast of a maiden." Lion went forth, as one out of comfort. "Behold, I had but one sister, and I have destroyed her. "I am distraught and hopeless, and will do penance. For seven whole years will lie on the dank ground, with never a roof but the blossoms of whitethorn."+ Few French ballads have a more familiar sound than this, the plot of which does not occur, however, in any extant Scotch or English romance. On the other hand, most of the ballad commonplaces are the * Bosquet: La Normandie Romanesque, p. 503. Another ballad may refer to Alix, who should have married our Richard I. + Bosquet, p. 81. A verse is omitted in the translation. same in the ballads of France as in our own country. There is the same luxury of gold and silver, silk and taffety. When the lover cuts the shroud of the pretended bride, he draws his couteau d'or fin. The very pruning-hook, in another lyric, is of gold. When the girls of Rochelle launch and man a boat La grand' voile est en dentelle, La misaine en satin blanc, Les cordages du navire Sont de fils d'or et d'argent. So, when the Demon Lover launches his ship, in the Scotch ballad— The masts they were of the beaten gold, The sails of taffetie. Other coincidences with Scotch, and with Italian and Danish ballads, occur. One of the most curious is in the song of John of Tours, which Mr. Rossetti has translated into English. The French version merely tells how John of Tours, or Renaud, as he is sometimes called, came home wounded from the wars at the hour when his wife had borne him a child, how his arrival and death were concealed from her, and there follows a string of questions and answers— "Oh dites-moi, ma mère, m'amie, Now, in the Celtic version of this story, the young husband meets a korrigan, or fay, combing her long hair in the wood, and is bewitched to death by her. His wife also dies, and two oak-trees grew from their graves, like the "bush and brier" of English ballads, and the plane-trees planted by the nymphs on a tomb in the Iliad. The Scotch version, on the other hand, has lost all the poetry of the tale, and has degenerated into a mere sing-song of question and answer, with which children amuse themselves, and the dead husband and living wife have become a dead girl, and her lover, who, when he asks where she may be, is put off with replies, and at last is told, "Janet is dead and gone; she'll ne'er come hame." This loss of all mythological traits, and of all romance, is quite a "note" of popular narrative ballads in France. They turn on incidents common to other countries, as to Northern Italy, and to Greece and Denmark, but they manage to reduce everything to a lower scale. Thus, in the Celtic ballad published by De la Villemarqué, it is a Crusader who leaves his wife at home, and on his return at the end of seven years, hears the "silvery voice" of a shepherdess, and finds that his bride has been driven out to the fields by the cruelty of his brother.* The song is full of allusions to red crosses, lances, pages, and all the local colour of feudalism. The French peasant has never heard of the Crusades; he makes the husband a Count indeed, who goes to the wars, but not for an idea, and certainly with no cross on his shoulder. Again, the French are necessarily without the material for songs like those which turn on the border raids of "Kinmont Willie" and "Dick-o'-the-Cow," or on the exploits of "Klephtsa" in Greece. They have always been the victims of plundering warfare, in which they have struck no blow for themselves. Yet they have at least one ballad which sounds curiously like a Romaic Klepht song in its last verses. It tells of a soldier who deserted, was brought back, and shot. Indeed, deserting soldiers are the most adventurous people known to the rural muse in France, and she sympathises with their revolt, as the border minstrels, or the poets of the Greek highlands, have a feeling for daring freebooters. The runaway is taking farewell of his comrades, just before his execution, and he ends thus: Soldats de mon pays, N' le dit' pas à ma mère. Qu'on n'me r'verra jamais. Now Fauriel has printed a Romaic ballad, in which one of two brother Klephts is shot by the Turks on the bank of a river. The wounded man bids his brother "make a boat of his body, and row with his hands" till he crosses the stream, and then to run to his home in the hills. One may translate the rest almost word for word into Scotch ballad form And if they ask for me, brother, Say I come never home, Beyond the salt sea foam. The green grass is my bridal bed, The black tomb my good-mother, The stones and dust within the grave Here is all the difference between the peasant, pressed to fight for no cause he understands, and the free mountaineer, dying for his own home, with words in his mouth like those of Job, "I have said to corruption, thou art my father, to the worm thou are my mother and my sister." * Barzaz Breiz. De la Villemarqué, p. 24, Just enough remains of French native peasant song to show that in France, as in Italy, Greece, Russia, Scotland, there was a time of a now lost popular culture. Education will never restore the power of uttering verses such as those which Shakspeare and Goethe, and even Euripides, it is said, have deigned to borrow from the popular storesnatches of dirge and love-song, the wail of Electra over her dead, the mad song of Marguerite, the lament of Ophelia. The wild stock from which artistic poetry sprang is almost decayed, and it only remains for antiquarian curiosity to collect these withering flowers, and to note how near akin in every European country are the lyrical expressions of the emotions of the people. A. L. |
